Promise of Jobs : Who Would Work at Port Disney, How Much Would They Be Paid? There Are No Firm Answers to This. . .
A bumper sticker circulated by proponents of a Disney theme park in Long Beach proclaims “24,000 new jobs . . . Like Magic!” In a community that has lately been feeling like something of an economic frog, talk of that many jobs holds the promise of a magical kiss that will change the city into a financial prince.
Yet as Long Beach courts the Walt Disney Co. to build a $3-billion resort park on the city’s waterfront, the entertainment giant’s alluring employment figures provide more questions than answers.
How many will be low-paying, dead-end jobs and how many will provide a decent living? Will a company that views hiring at its theme parks as a casting exercise and enforces a 1950s dress code favor Barbie and Ken look-alikes at the expense of the city’s poor and unemployed? Will it import its management from other Disney enterprises and leave the entry-level jobs to the locals?
So far Disney is not saying much except to predict that about 12,000 people would work at the resort and another 12,000 would be hired by local businesses thriving on the 13 million tourists a year expected to flock to Port Disney.
Claiming corporate confidentiality, the company won’t even publicly disclose information about the wages and ethnic mix of its Disneyland work force in Anaheim.
“A lot of the information we want, we’re not getting,” observed Felice Strauss, chairwoman of a citizen subcommittee examining the employment effects of the Port Disney proposal. As a result, she added, her group can’t say how worthwhile the Disney jobs would be or whether the company will hire significant numbers of Long Beach’s burgeoning minority population.
Disney and city officials maintain that it is simply too early to go into more detail about the nature of Port Disney jobs. City management is immersed in negotiations with Disney and the company is still debating whether to build its second Southern California theme park in Long Beach or in Anaheim.
“We just don’t know it. We don’t have it,” said David Malmuth, the Disney Development Co. vice president in charge of the Long Beach project. “It’s not as if we’re trying to keep it from people.”
Disney executives also say they have active minority recruitment programs and point to their Queen Mary operation in Long Beach as an example of their local hiring practices. Eighty percent of the Queen Mary workers are from Long Beach, Malmuth said, and reflect the city’s ethnic diversity.
Still, probably the most persistent question hanging over the Port Disney job projections is, “Who is going to get them?”
“(Disney has) this image of the All-American, well-scrubbed Aryan,” noted Donald Snow, president of a gay political group in Long Beach, the Lambda Democratic Club. It is an image that troubles some in a city that is now slightly more than half minority, a multicolored mix of Latinos, Asians and blacks, along with a sizable gay and lesbian community and an above-average number of poor.
As one Long Beach resident put it last year, “Importing blondes from Huntington Beach is not our idea of providing local jobs.”
If Disney brings fantasyland to Long Beach, it is “going to have to confront this city and its multiethnic character,” said Paul Schmidt, a Cal State Long Beach professor and vice chairman of Strauss’ group, the employment subcommittee of the Port Disney Citizen Advisory Committee appointed by the City Council.
Tonia Uranga, a manager of Garden Grove’s training employment program, offered little assurance of Disney’s ability to do that when she spoke to the subcommittee last summer.
When she took the Garden Grove job earlier this year, she assumed that with Disneyland only a few miles away, it would be a veritable gold mine of jobs for the unemployed and disadvantaged minority youths her counselors work with. She was wrong.
Uranga found that in the past three years not a single person registered with Garden Grove’s program had gotten a job in the Magic Kingdom.
“I didn’t know what the problem was. . . . It seemed a natural,” she recounted.
Her counselors told her that when they sent people for interviews, they ran afoul of Disney’s interview techniques, appearance standards and transportation requirements.
“We have a lot of kids who are not Ken and Barbie look-alikes but who want to work,” Uranga said. “The Disney image is to be wholesome, which is OK with me, but their idea of wholesome may not be my idea of wholesome.
“It appears my kids have too many ‘visual contradictions,’ ” she continued, referring to a Disney phrase. Uranga is still not sure what a visual contradiction is, but whatever it is, Disney wants to avoid it.
“I think it’s anything that doesn’t look like 1956,” Schmidt suggested.
Disney is well known for strict employee grooming standards at its theme parks that forbid everything from brightly colored nylons and heavy makeup on women to beards and hair below the ears on men.
“Walt (Disney) wanted the cast to enhance the guest experience and not to stand out from it. He didn’t want the cast to be the show. Disneyland was the show,” Malmuth explained.
Other job training programs near Disneyland also report difficulty in placing their clients with Disney.
Rita Slayton, project supervisor for Anaheim’s job training program, said that many of the youngsters her office works with “are at-risk kids, so a lot are not the Disney image.” Despite the fact that Disneyland is in the same city, she said only about 10 to 15 youngsters a year win jobs there from her program and the local state employment office.
Still, she said, those who have been hired have been minority members. “They are not white bread and they are not middle class.”
In Santa Ana, Disneyland has in past years hired 30 to 50 youngsters every summer from that city’s employment program. But only a few have been placed the last couple of years, apparently because of the softer economy, said a program spokeswoman.
She added that in their experience, the decisive factor in getting a Disney job was not appearance, but transportation. Disney wanted its workers to have access to a car.
David Cox, vice president of human resources for the West Coast division of Walt Disney Attractions, said the reason people had not been hired from Garden Grove’s program was that his office was not aware of its existence. He also maintained that the program had not referred applicants to Disneyland.
As for Disney’s grooming guidelines, he remarked, “That is something that I think can be met by any individual, regardless of what their race or sex is.”
While he would not reveal the ethnic composition of the Disneyland work force, he said the park works with a number of minority groups in recruiting and “has a good mix of minorities.”
Jeff LeTourneau, a union official who represents Disneyland workers, said the park “work force is largely (white), although they are trying hard to recruit and retain minorities.”
In contrast, he said the relatively low-paid, unskilled jobs at the Disney hotel are largely held by Latinos. That, he suggested, was partly because Anglos did not want such jobs and partly because some Latinos lacked the English language skills necessary for many park jobs.
Considering the hotel and theme park industry as a whole, LeTourneau said Disney pays well and has good benefits. But they are still service industry salaries, much lower paying than the manufacturing and aerospace jobs that Southern California is losing.
He said the bulk of full-time park workers make about $7 to $9 or $10 an hour once they have been employed for a few years. Those who work just on weekends earn no more than $6.75 an hour. Temporary summer help gets about $5 an hour. Non-tipped hotel workers are paid $5.75 to $7 an hour.
By Southern California standards, those wages are low income. According to federal housing guidelines, for instance, $10 an hour, or $21,000 a year, is considered very low income for a family of two or more. It is half the median family income for the region.
Long Beach City Manager James C. Hankla argued that such jobs are not to be discounted. “It’s going to give them a bottom rung on the ladder, which is not there now.”
“We’re trying to revitalize and anchor our tourism industry, which has always been important in Southern California and Long Beach . . . at the same time we’re also trying to revitalize our aerospace and manufacturing.”
Port Disney Jobs
Following are estimates of the potential jobs that would be created in the Long Beach area by the Port Disney project: Long Beach
Jobs in Construction Phase I* Phase II** Direct 22,500 5,400 Indirect 4,600 1,000 Total 27,100 6,400
Regional Indirect Impacts
Jobs in Construction Phase I* Phase II** L.A. County 12,900 2,700 Other Counties 8,100 1,700 5-County Area 21,000 4,400 Total 48,100 10,800
Annual Jobs After CompletionLong Beach
Jobs in Construction Phase II** Direct Disney 12,400 Other Direct 9,000 Indirect 2,500 Total 23,900
Regional Indirect Impacts
Jobs in Construction Phase II** L.A. County 7,500 Other Counties 5,300 5-County Area 12,800 Total Jobs 36,700
* Phase I of theme park to open in 2000.
** Phase II, an expansion program, to be completed by 2010.
Sources: The Walt Disney Co.; Kotin, Regan & Mouchly Inc.
